It happens every spring.
While you might have thought we were talking about the start of baseball season, this activity continues into summer, fall and winter too.
It's the time of the year called “scam-time,” a season that spans the entire calendar, no matter the weather.
The latest emerged in recent local headlines when agents of the FBI and the IRS raided the offices of a Spokane business, Team Spirit America. The resulting investigation revealed that hundreds of people were fleeced out of 10s of millions in yet another Ponzi scheme that promised in excess of 60 percent return.
Those who have obviously been taken in by the scheme have kept a low profile, perhaps choosing not to heap the shame of losing their nest eggs with the embarrassment of reminders of the age-old axiom: If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
But this is just one of dozens, or maybe hundreds, of scams and schemes that crooks use to attempt to get rich quick off the rest of us.
There's the e-mail from the Nigerian Chief Dele Ade who writes to “request for your assistance to transfer the sum of US $42,500,645 Million,” into your bank account. Frightening thing is that it's not just mental midgets that fall for this and get taken.
The elderly are big targets. A grandmother recently received a call allegedly placed from a Montreal, Canada jail where her grandson had been incarcerated for a DUI and needed in the neighborhood of $5,000 for bail. Turns out her grandson didn't drink and when she called him at work, he answered.
No place it seems is safe.
One local resident put mail in the roadside box but crooks came by and made off with the contents – including outgoing checks with their critical bank routing number. When they tried to use bogus checks, a wise credit union employee thought something wasn't right and stopped the scam.
Even the 2010 Census is not immune. The mayor of Harrisburg, Penn., Linda Thompson, was victimized when she filled out a fake form that even asked for a social security number. She never realized that what she had submitted was fake until her real form appeared a few days later.
So you see, this list is virtually endless and the damage they cause is potentially devastating.
Those who fall into these traps for one reason or another are likely just not in touch with today's fast-moving world that produces as many technology breakthroughs as it does scammers and flim-flammers.
The older generation may simply trust that today's world is the same one they grew up in where one never locked their doors and everyone knew and trusted their neighbors.
So since it seems that people can never be told enough about that age-old consumer warning, here's yet another reminder that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
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